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Love Exposure

Synopsis

After Yu's mother dies his father, a priest, only seems to take solace in the confessions of his sons sins causing Yu to partake in various 'sinful' activities to appease him. This is a teen love story as only the Japanese could bring us, complete with up-skirt photography, cross dressing, and bloody gore.

Love Exposure has the greatest story I have ever seen depicted on film. The movie's scope is incredible: a four hour love story that weaves religious dogma, ultra-violence, perversion, and a million other topics into a flawless tapestry. This is a film that needs to be experienced in one devoted play-though, free of distractions, so that you can get invested in the complex characters and their tragically doomed relationships. Like my Daisies review, I will first discuss why you need to watch the film in the first paragraph, then I will get into dissecting the reasons why this movie is amazing.

Four hours is a lot of time to invest in a movie, as it falls into that awkward space…

My head is spinning, my cheeks are red. Sion Sono just gave me the biggest slap of my life.

"Bakayaro! You think you've seen everything." yelled Sono. He proceeded to strip and expose me, grabbed my genitals and dragged me out of my comfort zone.

What laid before my eyes was an entirely new form of art, unlike anything I've ever seen. Behold, the beauty of discomfort, the magnificence of perversion! Ai No Mukidashi!

And I was drooling, so hard, for four fucking hours. I've taken a drug two times more powerful than Miike's. No matter how I see it, the film just doesn't seem to fit into this bland universe. The manic editing, the utterly bizzare plot. But yet…

Sian Sono’s Love Exposure is a 4 hour journey. But my God did those 4 hours fly away like dust in a whirlwind but never failing to leave a strong impression, memories and the emotions accrued throughout, embossed in my heart.

This film had me captivated right from the start and did not let go until it was finished. And when it did, I did not want it to finish and had such an urge for it go on. Such was its magnetic enigma and such was the innumerable themes handled. It deals with the traumas of childhood, the effects of bad parenthood, yearning to meet the love of your life, faith in God, faith in love, perversity, revenge, madness,…

First off, I want to thank Hentai Cop for being the first to bring this film to my attention. His great review urged me to put this on my watchlist. And look! I told you I'd get around to it eventually. And I want to give you a double thanks. Because it did not disappoint.

Love Exposure or, Sexual Tension: The Movie, is a crazy off the wall epic Japanese love story. It's nearly 4 hours long and doesn't stop for anybody or anything. The zany over the top Japanese antics infect nearly every minute of this film, and it all plays out like a giant graphic…

A long, theatrical, apoplectic exhalation from an immorally rapturous camera.

Sion Sono's blazingly irreverent, wantonly fatalistic opus is the fastest 4-hour movie you'll ever see, taking a deep dive into two of the three rancid souls set on a sick-humoured collision course with one another long before the oh-no-you-didn’t moment of the main title exploding out of the screen 53 minutes into the movie, during a chaotic all-hands-on-deck street brawl whose comedic carnage serves as a precursor to the director's own Tokyo Tribe.

Love Exposure is many things over its expansive running time, but amidst its gleefully rug-pulling tonal shifts and increasingly careening mood swings, is a cubist thriller whose fractured narrative is sadistically spun around and reconstructed to bleakly…

Definitely flawed and inconsistent at points, if only because of Sono's uncompromising ambition. It's like he wanted to make a love story with cult elements -- but instead of taking the easy route from point A to B, he sets up each subsequent scene with the most convoluted and creatively unexpected (un)imaginable. And yet, despite its completely outlandish premise and its tendency to not take itself very seriously, moments that would be otherwise hilarious if examined in isolation play earnestly. This aforementioned structure finds thematic resonance: the movie tackles things like violence, media, religion, but above all it is a plea for empathy towards all things weird. Honestly, it's probably the most emotionally affected a movie has made me in…

This was a long movie...if you know what I mean ;) Seriously though! To me, the most impressive thing about the movie was that, despite the 4 hour run time and ridiculous twists and turns in both plot and tone, Sono managed to keep the (super wacky) characters grounded and incredibly sympathetic. I love the ways that they develop as the film goes on and their relationships get more and more entangled. Also, he finds ways to keep it fresh and fun; qualities that are hard to maintain over a 90 minute runtime let alone three times that amount! Fantastic

An absurd and wild film, Sion Soto's 'Love Exposure' is twice as long as my favorite 'Why Don't You Play in Hell?', so I was daunted but excited to finally watch it in its entirety. In all honestly, the first 2 hours were solid, especially the music in the first hour. The crazy themes of lust and love are quickly entangled once the main character is trapped in a kind of Shakespearean love trap. The sequences towards the beginning were exciting, and once he starts taking the upskirt photos was downright hilarious. However, the film really lost its steam for me personally, even though there were a couple of good scenes up to the end.

Unlike anything you'll ever see, but doesn't finish as well as I expected after investing 4 hours.

Not only one of my favorites, but one of the very best films ever made, Love Exposure is utterly ridiculous, completely overblown, absolutely insane, amazing, stylish, violent, bloody, fast-paced, weird, religious and profane, immense and small-scale. It evokes almost every emotion possible: it's funny, depressing, endearing, frustrating, uplifting. In its center lies one of the most compelling, well-written, believable romances ever. A four-hour film that blazes through your eyes, that holds your attention throughout the whole duration. So what if it's perverted? What's wrong with being a pervert?, Yu would ask. I find it impossible to understand how someone could dislike such a creative, inventive work of genius.